Biography of Rose DIENG-KUNTZ

Senegal > Science : Rose DIENG-KUNTZ

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Biography :

Rose Dieng Kuntz (born ,in 1956- Died June 30, 2008) was ascientistof Senegalese origin living in France.

Rose Dieng-Kuntz was awarded the2005 Irène Joliot-Curie Prize from the Ministry for Research and the EADS group, honoring a woman who has established herself through her career and her contribution to science.

After her brilliant studies at Van Vollenhoven secondary school in Dakar (Senegal) - 1st prize in Mathematics, French and Latin in the 1972 general examination in Senegal, and 2nd prize in Greek, recipient of the scientific baccalaureat with honours and compliments of the jury - Rose Dieng-Kuntz continued her studies in France where she was the first woman from Senegal and from Africa to be admitted to the Ecole polytechnique in 1976. She joined INRIA in 1985 after obtaining a doctorate degree in information technology and publishing a thesis on the specification of parallelism at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications.

Rose Dieng-Kuntz was senior research scientist at INRIA and scientific leader of the ACACIA project-team (knowledge acquisition for aided design through agent interaction) at the INRIA Sophia Antipolis research unit, where worked from 1992. She was the second woman to become a project leader at INRIA.

“We would like to emphasise not only the exceptional personality of Rose Dieng-Kuntz and her exemplary academic and professional career, but also the vision of this scientist who had the foresight to initiate research on the problem of knowledge modelling and acquisition more than ten years ago.Just after the invention of the Web and well before its widespread use around the world, what insight to envisage its applications, understand its limits and decipher its evolution!She has demonstrated not only remarkable scientific daring and great self-confidence, but also a rare, independent spirit by leaving the golden path of academia to strike out alone down the difficult and risky road to the unknown and discovery", says Michel Cosnard, director of INRIA Sophia Antipolis.

The ACACIA project-team that she led first worked on methods and tools to assist in knowledge acquisition. In 1995, with the advent of the Web as a privileged means for spreading knowledge, ACACIA project research was expanded to include implementation of knowledge servers on the web and the creation of corporate memories. Knowledge management has thus become the main theme in this research. ACACIA was one of the first projects in the "knowledge engineering" community to understand the importance of the semantic web, as early as 1998. It has proposed an original approach to knowledge management based on the semantic web. The ACACIA collective publication on Knowledge Management is a recognized reference work.

“As far as the future is concerned, my vision is that of a web of knowledge linking individuals, organisations, countries and continents.The research we are aiming for seeks to improve cooperation between business and the community by building “knowledge webs”, a goal that is in phase with the Europe's target of evolving from an “information society” to a “knowledge society”, explains Rose Dieng-Kuntz. The ACACIA team developed the CORESE semantic search engine used to find resources in a semantic web context and offering approximate search capabilities.

Deeply committed to bringing science to the national and international research community, Rose Dieng-Kuntz strives to communicate her passion to young people (and girls in particular).

She passed away on Monday June 30. She was a specialist in artificial intelligence, working for the last few years on knowledge management and the semantic web. Rewarded on several occasions for the quality of her work, she was awarded the 2005 Irène Joliot-Curie Prize, honoring a woman who has established herself through her contribution to science. In 2006, she had been made a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honor. INRIA and the scientific community lose an exceptional woman by virtue of her career, convictions and personnal commitment.